The DEA’s unfinished business in Afghanistan

A marine with 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, greets local children working in the farmlands near Patrol Base Shark in Afghanistan's Helmand province. (Photo courtesy of the ISAF Headquarters Public Affairs Office. CC-BY-2.0.)

On Friday, July 15, the first 650 U.S. troops of many more to follow began to withdraw from Afghanistan, beginning what President Barack Obama described three weeks ago as his plan to remove as many as 10,000 American soldiers from the country in 2011 and another 33,000 by September 2012. The remaining troops are set to withdraw by 2014, according to a decision made during a NATO summit held in Lisbon in November 2010.

As those uniformed troops begin heading home, approximately 75 or more analysts and agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) remain to serve as proxy war fighters in at least four forward operating bases in Konduz, Jalalabad, Kandahar and Herat. Their presence defines the “drug war” in an abstract form, given that the DEA mission is one of the relatively unknown facets of the war in Afghanistan, the battles of which are being fought in the opium fields of that country every day.

Why is the United States is investing so much in terms of DEA personnel, money and other resources into Afghanistan’s poppy fields? The answer is as simple as it is counterintuitive: terrorism. As long as opium and heroin sales fuel terrorism, the United States has an imperative to stem the flow of those funds.

The U.S. attacks beginning in October 2001 and subsequent invasion of Afghanistan led to the dismantling of the Taliban, an insurgent movement that supported the terrorist activities of Al Qaeda. Profits they derived from opium and heroin sales were used to fill the coffers of the Al Qaeda terrorist network, and the money was used to corrupt government officials in Afghanistan and fund terrorist activities throughout the world. As a result, opium cultivation has become one of Afghanistan’s primary sources of illegal revenue and a source of funding for terrorism.

The continued and increased revenues gained from the sale of Afghan opium and heroin will continue to be a source of funds for terrorist operations, much to the detriment of the United States. This is true despite the fact that heroin and other opiates produced in Afghanistan are consumed within the region and in countries along the supply chain as the drugs head towards the primary consumer market in Europe. The United Kingdom’s Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA) estimates that the majority of the heroin found in Britain is derived from Afghanistan. It is also important to note that heroin produced in Afghanistan continues to be smuggled into the United States, but in significantly smaller amounts than what is sold in Europe.

The continued drug trade has caused DEA to shift its mission parameters and operate in Afghanistan as paramilitary war fighters amid the deadly fields of a terrorist war, creating “mission creep,” slipping away from serving as a “single-mission” agency. DEA’s current-day presence and warlike posture in Afghanistan also creates an unintended inversion of the Posse Comitatus Act, the provision of law that prohibits U.S. uniformed soldiers from acting in a domestic law enforcement capacity. Ironically, assigning U.S. federal law enforcement personnel to perform in a paramilitary capacity overseas tends to supplant the U.S. military forces that have also been working to rid the country of Afghan drug lords who fund terrorism. This now defines DEA in a new way: as a hybrid military force that was never envisioned in federal law enforcement prior to 9/11.

Notwithstanding the reasons for removing U.S. military forces from the field of battle, DEA has made the right choice, the only choice that an agency can make — to step into that field of battle in defense of its nation “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

Gary J. Hale is the nonresident fellow in drug policy at the Baker Institute. From 2000 to 2010, he held the position of chief of intelligence in the Houston Field Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). From 1990 to 1997, Hale had various assignments in Washington, D.C., including serving as chief of the Heroin Investigations Support Unit, chief of the Dangerous Drugs Intelligence Unit and liaison to the National Security Agency. During this period, he also served a tour of duty at the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá, Colombia. From 1997 to 1998, Hale was assigned as the DEA intelligence chief at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. In 1990, Hale received the DEA Administrator’s Award, the agency’s highest recognition.